pardonmydandyism

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Lucy Liu in her art studio

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Gideon protects!

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oh these have gotten SO much fatter than when I originally got them....

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I’m gonna do it! I’m gonna do the dishes!

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The Sound of Music (1965) dir. Robert Wise

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vulcan horror movies would be an exercise in emotional regulation against fear, targeted directly at vulcans' deepest insecurities. movies titled "IT IS ILLOGICAL TO QUIVER AT THIS SEQUENCE OF EVENTS" which, if one of its hundred-and-six jumpscares gets you, you'll never live it down. humans find them annoyingly scary, like a friend who won't stop trying to "get" you.

you'd think that klingon horror movies are gorefests, but it's actually quite the opposite: gore is honorable, and nothing is scarier than dishonor. they often show a person whose life falls apart despite their own valiance and virtues: like an earth tragedy but with someone who clearly doesn't deserve it. at the end, there's often an operatic number where the protagonist exclaims that there's nothing they could have done to prevent their abysmal fate.

ferengi horror movies are documentaries about stock market crashes

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It's my goal to write positive yet unhinged comments on people's fics and I haven't been that successful. There's only so many ways you can say someone has sold their soul to the devil before it becomes blasé. Any ideas?

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So I may have finally listened to that one podcast and I’m feeling completely normal about it.

Please don’t ask where I’ve been for the last

*checks notes*

Yikes, a year almost? I’ve been busy with life lol

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I am begging the FDA to require that companies CANNOT just put "spices" as an ingredient but have to label the spices.

"Spices" can mean "this has some oregano and black pepper in it" or it can mean "this has cumin cayenne and paprika and if you eat this you will be sick in bed in pain for a week" for me.

Seriously, this is an allergy issue and a huge oversight on the part of corporations.

Require detailed labeling of spices used in packaged foods NOW.

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i pray the rock is never rolled away

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✦ fluorescence

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There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.

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'The world without us'. Shaun Tan.

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Prageeta Sharma, from “I Am Learning to Find the Horizons of Peace”, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World